This disclosure relates generally to patient positioning and support systems useful in medical applications including radiation therapy and medical imaging, and in other applications.
Various patient positioning and support systems for radiation therapy, diagnostic imaging, or other medical procedures are known in the art. For radiation therapy, accurate positioning of patients is necessary to ensure accurate delivery of radiation doses to a treatment volume and to avoid overexposure of healthy tissue to high energy radiation. Accurate positioning of patients is also important in diagnostic imaging for determining the exact location of the treatment volume and other related information for treatment planning. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a patient positioning system that can accurately position patients and allows correction of patient positions with full motion compatibility.
Imaging systems are increasingly used in radiation therapy e.g. to evaluate treatment results. For instance, images of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may provide good soft-tissue contrast of the patient anatomy. Images of X-ray imaging such as computed tomography (CT) may provide good contrast between bone density and soft tissue and have good spatial and temporal resolution. In some applications, a system including multiple imaging machines such as an MRI scanner and a CT scanner may be desirable to take the advantages provided by both imaging modalities. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a patient positioning system that has sufficient range of movements and degrees of freedom in moving and positioning patients between a radiation treatment machine and an imaging machine, or between two or more imaging machines of different modalities.
Radiation therapy has developed to treat various diseases in a patient, including such as head and neck cancers, breast cancers, and prostate cancers etc. Structures for supporting a patient in treatment of brain cancers may be different from those in treatment of prostate cancers. Structures for supporting a patient in diagnostic imaging may also be different from those in radiation therapy partly due to the effects of different radiation energies on imaging and treatment. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a patient support system that allows quick and easy changing of patient supports depending on required treatment or imaging, or depending on the location of the treatment volume in the patient.